Friday, August 29, 2014

Because Every Day Is Anti-Labor Day

If you were looking for a refreshing holiday beverage that combines all the worst impulses of the Koch Brothers' fanatical neo-feudalism with all the hysterical Libruls!Are!Comin!!To!Kill!You! paranoia of the Koch Brothers, you couldn't do much better than this whiny manifesto on the horrors workers who stand up for their rights from Mark Mix, president of the Corporate Droit du Seigneur Legal Defense Foundation National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.

It’s Labor Day, not Union Day

Most Americans realize Labor Day is about celebrating workers and their contribution to our free society, but that won’t stop union bosses from stealing the spotlight to push their own agenda...

Yes, unions want to fuck up poor Mr. Mix's Labor Day by dragging labor into it!

Doesn't waste much time getting right to the Airing of The Grievances, does he?

But not to worry; America's bright oligarchic future has not been completely destroyed by Union Thugs. There are still things to celebrate.

In Wisconsin, the state supreme court upheld in entirety Gov. Scott Walker’s public-sector unionism reforms, commonly known as “Act 10,” which grants Right to Work protections to most Wisconsin government employees.

Mr. Mix also has plenty to say about how run amok with power the peasants have gotten and how they are Very Rudely attempting to crash the corrupt political monopoly Mr. Mix's employers are buying for themselves --

National Right to Work's Deep Connections to the Koch Brothers and the John Birch Society

The NRTWC has deep connections within the national right-wing network led by the Koch brothers. Reed Larson, who led the NRTW groups for over three decades, hails from Wichita, Kansas, the hometown of Charles and David Koch. Larson became an early leader of the radical right-wing John Birch Society in Kansas, which Fred Koch (the father of Charles and David) helped found. Several other founders and early leaders of the NRTWC were members and leaders of the John Birch Society, specifically the Wichita chapter of which Fred Koch was an active member.

The groups remain tied to the Kochs. In 2012, the Kochs' Freedom Partners group funneled $1 million to the National Right to Work Committee, while the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation gave a $15,000 grant to the NRTWLDF, which has also received significant funding from the Koch-connected DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund. Today, at least three former Koch associates work as attorneys for the NRTWLDF.

In June 2010, Mark Mix, the current head of the NRTW groups, attended the Kochs' exclusive Aspen strategy meeting to give a presentation on how to mobilize conservatives for the 2010 election, along with representatives from Koch-backed groups such as the Center to Protect Patient Rights (now called American Encore) and Americans for Prosperity.

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What people like Mr. Mix have going for them is a tiny cabal of single-minded patrons willing to spend a mountain of money to remake the world in their image.

At least with Feudalism, the nobles had a code they were supposed to follow where they were obligated to take care of the needs of their peasants. "Nobless Obligue" but pardon my spelling of the term. Sure, some nobles might have followed this practice better than others but at least the tradition was in place.

Today, our neo-feudal lords follow a Randian philosophy where being poor is both the fault of the poor person and a sign of moral failure. There is no obligation by the rich to take care of anyone but themselves.

I was sitting at a meeting at my old newspaper job where we were pondering what, if any, special story/ies we should do to mark Labor Day. Shrugs all around. Finally, one guy roused himself to offer the incredibly original idea, "Well, I could write something about how organized labor is on the decline and doesn't really represent workers anymore."

Finally I raised my hand and said "Well, since we never, for example, put an atheist on the front page on Christmas Day, how about we mark Labor Day by talking to an actual labor leader?"

The looks I got.

No one was actually angry or dubious about the idea, but reactions could be fairly characterized as ranging from "Man make FIRE with small blue thing he had in pocket!" to "That is so GODDAMNED CRAZY it JUST MIGHT WORK."

I was the only person to think of it. Literally the only. Of course, the act of proposing it also constituted the act of volunteering to do it, an extra workload that I didn't need. But aside from one of the more embarrassing detail errors I ever committed, it came out OK. And for the love of God it wasn't "It's Labor Day, so let's write about how labor sucks."

So if anyone's looking for laughs, let's make that a Labor Day weekend project: Go through whatever mainstream media you consume, count the "Labor sucks" stories and compare to the number of actual stories featuring labor leaders talking about the present and future of organized labor, including alternatives to unions (real alternatives, not "shut up and stop complaining"). And think of how many profiles of atheists you see in the newspaper on Christmas Day.

I recall one Labor Day column by the Cincinnati Enquirer's Resident Racist Thug in which he insulted city workers (many of whom are blah). I wrote him a gentle suggestion that he might want to engage in real work and get a "real job". He fired back with a letter stating when he was in college he worked on a road crew.